Inside ‘Locke & Key’s Long, Wild Road To Netflix

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Locke & Key

Here’s how the TV development process usually works: a pilot, or test episode is shot; it’s brought in front of a network; they decide to pick up the series, or not. There are obviously a near infinite number of variations in there, and occasionally a pilot will be scrapped and reshot (Game of Thrones being the most famous example). But mostly if a show is dead, it’s dead.

…And then there’s Locke & Key, which finally debuts on Netflix on February 7 after one of the wildest, most convoluted, and certainly unprecedented journeys to screen in television history.

“Before February 7, I’m still afraid it’s going to be canceled,” artist Gabriel Rodriguez said half-joking during a recent interview. “I’m very optimistic, I’m very happy that it’s probably going to happen, but I’m not going to take anything for granted until it finally airs.”

To understand Rodriguez’s hesitance, you have to jump back in time 12 years to when Locke & Key was first published by IDW Publishing in February of 2008. Written by Joe Hill with art by Rodriguez, Locke & Key focuses on the Locke family, who move to the family patriarch’s ancestral home in Massachusetts after he’s murdered. There, they discover mysterious, magical keys, all with different abilities; and an evil entity living in the well near the house who will stop at nothing to get them.

Hot off the Transformers movies and the 2009 Star Trek reboot, Kurtzman and Orci developed the project for TV (early rumors had it still set as a movie, but those seem to have been incorrect). By August, 2010, Steven Spielberg — who was also working with Kurtzman and Orci on the dinosaur drama Terra Nova — was on board as an Executive Producer, and Josh Friedman (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) joined as writer and showrunner.

A pilot was shot for Fox from October, 2010, through February, 2011, directed by Mark Romanek, and starring Mirando Otto as Locke family matriarch Nina Locke, music star Jesse McCartney as eldest child Tyler Locke, Nick Stahl as Uncle Duncan Locke and LOST‘s Mark Pellegrino as murdered father Rendell Locke.

Unused logo for the Fox Locke & Key pilot, from a trailer released on Vimeo.Photo: Vimeo/Fox

…and then by May, 2011, the pilot was dead. Though reports vary, the decision came down to the wire for Fox, and after picking up J.J. Abrams’ Alcatraz for the 2011-2012 season there wasn’t room on the schedule for two expensive, supernatural mystery shows. Fox briefly considered turning Locke & Key into a limited event series, but that would have skyrocketed the budget, and plans were nixed. The show was then shopped around to networks, before being killed, for good.

Or was it? In a rare move, IDW was given permission to hold a screening and panel for the pilot at that year’s San Diego Comic-Con, a spot usually reserved for upcoming TV shows and movies. The panel proved so popular, a second screening was added, and an encore at that October’s New York Comic Con.

Perhaps due to the overwhelmingly positive response to the pilot from fans, which made tweaks but mostly faithfully adapted the first volume of the series, Locke & Key continued to bounce around the media-verse for years afterwards. In 2014, a few months after the final issue of Hill and Rodriguez’s six volume epic was published by IDW, Kurtzman and Orci made the surprise announcement at that year’s Comic-Con that they were now developing Locke & Key as a film trilogy for Universal. Perhaps due to the dissolution of that partnership, the project never panned out, and IDW took back the rights.

“Yeah, I don’t think that the movie trilogy is going to happen,” Hill told me when we discussed the Audible audio-book version of the series at MTV News. “The rights with Universal… I believe they have slipped all the way back to IDW, and I think the plan now is to take another pass at doing the TV thing. IDW has started… Apparently they have enough financing and enough clout, so they can do some of their own TV shows. So now the conversation is about trying to develop it as a TV show in house. And they have a couple things going along those lines. I know they’re working on a Dirk Gently TV show. So maybe the third time’s the charm?”

Turns out, not quite.

Two years later, Hulu announced they had ordered another pilot for a potential series, from LOST‘s Carlton Cuse, Lindsey Springer, and horror director Scott Derrickson. Derrickson was eventually replaced due to scheduling conflicts by Andy Muschietti, whose IT adaptation was still a few months away from smashing box office expectations. The pilot was filmed, starring Frances O’Connor as Nina Locke; and then a year later it was clear Hulu had passed on the project. In this case, it may have been poor timing more than anything else… Hulu put a pause on their pilot program as a whole right after looking at Locke & Key, and even with multiple scripts written and sets built didn’t move forward with the project, signaling a general shift in strategy for the streamer.

It’s also possible, to read between the lines, that there was a weird parallel to the Fox situation with Hulu… Four months after Hulu passed on Locke & Key, they launched the first season of Castle Rock, a supernatural mystery series set in a small town produced by none other than J.J. Abrams, a.k.a. Mr. Alcatraz himself. Also given that Hill is Stephen King’s son, and Castle Rock is based on the works of King, it’s certainly logical to think that Hulu may have felt the two projects would have played to similar audiences.

Filming two pilots for an adaptation for two networks is pretty weird. But you know what’s weirder? Filming three pilots, and that’s exactly what happened next. Due to the strength of the Hulu pilot, Cuse, Hill and Muschietti shopped the project around again, and this time Netflix picked it up for a full season.

Photo: Netflix

What will debut on February 7 is a completely revamped, rewritten, redeveloped version of Locke & Key that only retains a few member of the Hulu cast: Jackson Robert Scott as the youngest kid, Bode Locke; Thomas Mitchell Barnet, who was originally cast as Bode’s friend Rufus and then recast as villain Sam Lesser for Netflix; and Sherri Saum, who actually first auditioned for teacher Ellie Whedon in 2010. Aron Eli Coleite, Meredith Averill, and Rick Jacobs joined the production team along with Hill and Cuse, and after 12 years of stops and starts, Keyhouse and its residents will launch a ten episode long first season on Netflix next month.

“The experience at Hulu definitely informed the decision-making that Meredith and I made when we started redeveloping the project for Netflix,” Cuse told Decider on creating the Netflix version of Locke & Key. “One, we kind of got to see what worked and didn’t work, or at least, in our judgement worked or didn’t work. And then secondly, just had all this time to kind of think about it creatively, and to ruminate about, you know, what the show should be.”

What will show up on screen is best described as a remix of the material. There are 37 issues of the comic book, plus several done in one stories, told over the course of six-ish volumes. But even with the plethora of material provided by Hill and Rodriguez, you can’t just put what’s on page directly on screen.

“We do hit most of the major plot points,” Averill told Decider, “or many of the major plot points that are in the graphic novel, but we sometimes just arrive at them and in a slightly different way.”

A large part of that is due to Hill’s (and by extension Rodriguez’s) participation through the past decade and change that’s kept the project steady as it changed networks and movie studios, as well as a willingness to figure out how the material works best for television. In a recent featurette released by Netflix, Rodriguez showed off his iconic double-page spread of the Head Key — one of the house’s many magical keys, that allows you to view the emotions and memories in your own brain — with Cuse and Averill adding that they tweaked the visual language to help it pay out more over the course of a television season.

“[Joe] co-wrote the pilot episode, in which we introduced two brand new keys, which we collaborated with him on,” Averill continued. “So, I think that having heard it described as a little bit of the remix is an appropriate way to think of it. But it’s still very much in line with the spirit of the comics.”

That, in essence, is what has been keeping Locke & Key alive. Many comics have passionate fanbases; but Hill, Rodriguez, and everyone else involved, from Kurtzman and Orci to Cuse and Averill have fallen in love with the span of the story, what Averill describes as, “the horror, the fantasy, the sort-of teen drama story, the murder mystery.” It’s also, arguably, what has kept Locke & Key so difficult to adapt for so long, that it refuses to stay in one mode for long, instead jumping ably between different types of stories in order to more fully capture the experience of the Locke kids growing up.

And finally, that story will be shown, at least in part, on screen.

“I mean at the end of the day, all anybody cares about is, is the show good?” Cuse said. “Is it enjoyable? Do you like to watch it? I feel like we got it to the place, at least creatively, where we’re proud of it.”

Locke & Key debuts on Netflix on February 7.

This story has been updated to include casting info about Thomas Mitchell Barnet and Sherri Saum.